Translated from Norwegian by Damion SearlsPublished by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023, 46 pages. Original version published in 2023. A man drives without a destination, out of boredom. He continues driving until the road takes him into a forest, and his car gets stuck on the forest road. He gets out of the car and instead of …
Author: suroor alikhan
I have always been an avid reader. I read across genres and try and find books by writers from countries around the world. One of the things I love is talking to fellow readers about books!
The Hatter’s Ghosts: Georges Simenon
Translated from French by Howard CurtisPublished by Penguin, 2022, 196 pages. First translated into English in 1960. Original version published in 1949. “It was the third of December and still raining. ... In fact, for the last twenty days, it had been raining almost without interruption.” It started raining in the small French town of …
They Called Us Enemy: written by George Takei with Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott, and drawn by Harmony Becker
Published by Top Shelf, 2019, 208 pages. After the attack on Pearl Harbour by the Japanese on 7 December 1941, the US government declared that all people of Japanese origin were “enemy aliens”, including those who were US citizens. They were rounded up and incarcerated. The assumption was that their race made them “nonassimilable” and …
Growing Up in the Somali Desert: An Interview with Shugri Said Salh
Shugri Said Salh is a Somali writer, now living in San Diego, USA. Her memoir, The Last Nomad: Coming of Age in the Somali Desert (2021) won the 2022 Gold Nautilus Award, Multicultural and Indigenous Category; and was a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize; the 2021 CALIBA/Golden Poppy Award; as well as …
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The Last Murder at the End of the World: Stuart Turton
Published by Raven Books / Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024, 332 pages. It is the end of the world as we know it. A black fog has swept through the world, destroying every living thing in its wake: “the fog kills anything it touches...Unfortunately, it covers the entire earth, except for our island and half a mile …
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Descent into Dystopia
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, published by Grove Press, 2023, 320 pages.The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, published by Hamish Hamilton, 2023, 645 pages. Review by Usha Raman The scariest dystopian novels are those that seem to be set on the inside edge of our times. Anyone who reads the daily news (or worse, watches …
Black River: Nilanjana Roy
Published by Pushkin Vertigo, 2022, 350 pages. The best crime fiction is more than just a whodunnit—it shines a light on the darker side of society. This is true of Nilanjana Roy’s Black River: it is dark, heart-breaking and ultimately redemptive. Munia is a little girl who lives with her father Chand, a farmer, in …
The Last Brother: Nathacha Appanah
Translated from French by Geoffrey StrachanPublished by Maclehose Press, 2010, 201 pages. Original version published in 2007. This is a story narrated by Raj, an old man looking back at a crucial period in his childhood, a time that changed his life forever. Raj grows up in Mapou, a village in the north of Mauritius, …
Demon Copperhead: Barbara Kingsolver
Published by Faber / HarperCollins, 2022, 548 pages. “My thinking here is to put everything in the order of how it happened, give or take certain intervals of a young man skunked out of his skull box, some dots duly connected. But damn. A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing. …
Tokyo Express: Seichō Matsumoto
Translated from Japanese by Jesse KirkwoodPublished by Penguin, 1971, 149 pages. Original version published in 1958. The bodies of a man and a woman are found on the beach on Kyushu. The way the bodies are lying, and the empty bottle of orange juice near them—which was found to contain cyanide—seems to point to a …
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